A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece called Three Things You Should be Saying to Your Martial Arts Students, where I encouraged teachers to reinforce for their students that practice matters more than talent. I received a lot of great feedback and got into some great discussions. The piece was even translated into…
Horsemanship Level 4: Full Practical Grooming For Level 3 you had to identify and show knowledge of all the items in a complete grooming kit. For Level 4 you will need to put them to use: 4. Full practical grooming, complete kit. The good news is we do not watch you groom. Instead you are expected…
A recently translated book shows a combination of martial arts taught for Japanese police officers in 1888. It was translated by Eric Shahan, who specializes in translating 19th- and 20th-century Japanese martial arts texts. Read the article on LiveScience. Samurai Secrets: 1888 Martial Arts Manual for Cops Revealed I have to mention the caveat that…
HEMA is not a "dead" art. Notwithstanding that most of it is based on fight books from medieval/renaissance times, our community is seeing a modern rebirth of the art with new schools being established, old techniques being rediscovered or reinterpreted (or even created), a revived interest in lost swords and their related history, and, maybe most…
Read More... from Rediscovered Sword Press: News for January 2016
Over the month of January Academie Duello and I hosted a training challenge that set a goal of 30 minutes of swordplay training per day for 30 days. Whether this was over and above your usual training quota or simply reporting on it was up to each participant. Specific additional training goals could also be set…
Read More... from The Conclusion of the 30 for 30 Swordplay Challenge
Horsemanship Level 4: Stable & Pasture The Stable & Pasture assessment for Level 4 requires you to: 2. Identify good & bad features of setup, emphasizing safety. Clean a stall, choice of tools. This means you now need to apply judgement to your knowledge. Very few stables are ideal. We often wish our pastures, paddocks,…
Stage combat and Method acting don't mix. What do we mean by "Method acting"? Here's part of what Wikipedia has to say: Strasberg used the term “Method” to describe his philosophy of acting and his techniques of training actors, which built upon some of Stanislavski's early ideas. Strasberg's method is based upon the idea that…
The health and fitness industry is insane. There’s no denying it, and it’s at its most crazy every January to coincide with the world’s outpourings of New Year’s resolutions on the back of the world's mass influx of calories over the holidays. There’s also no escaping it, from bizarre fad diets to esoteric exercise devices-cum-torture…
Read More... from The Good, the Bad and the Bizarre of Historical Health and Fitness Advice
When you're standing in front of your students you have an opportunity to not only convey martial arts technique but also to positively shape thinking. The psychology with which we approach learning and practice is incredibly influential over our success at that practice and our energy to keep at it long term. Here are some things…
Read More... from Three Things You Should Be Saying to Your Martial Arts Students
Horsemanship Level 4: Turnout Horsemanship 4 is the first level in our program in which you will be examined on your appearance. 1. Candidate’s turnout. Safe, tidy, clean, AD shirt, footwear, hair, gloves. At first glance it may seem superficial or trivial to have a dress code. Indeed, at earlier levels we only require that…
The single most important factor in learning any new physical skill is general strength, or the ability to press and pull with different parts of your body in all directions. By conditioning, we generally mean the endurance to perform work over an extended period of time. Both general strength and conditioning are essential elements to…
Sometimes -- just sometimes -- on a nice summer day, one likes to sit quietly on their own at a wee Bistro table with a view of the street, sipping at one’s coffee (black, thank you very much), and concentrate on looking at pretty things. This book qualifies as that "pretty thing". Ken Mondschein has edited the…
Read More... from Book Review: The Knightly Art of Battle by Mondschein
Academie Duello's Spring and Summer Camp, Knight Camp (for kids), is coming up in March so I wanted to share a video of a talk I gave in 2014 about how the camp changed from its early beginning as Sword Camp, more than a decade ago, to a camp focused not only on swords but…
Read More... from How Virtues Changed Sword Camp into Knight Camp